The CATER Initiative Cost-Effective Appropriate Technologies for Emerging Regions

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The CATER InitiativeCost-Effective Appropriate
Technologies for Emerging Regions

• Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
• Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
• New York University
• A joint effort with researchers from Courant
  Institute, NYU School of Medicine, NYU Wagner
  School of Public Policy

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The CATER Lab

• Mission
• Develop low-cost and appropriate Information and
• Communication Technologies (ICT) for improving
  essential
• services in developing regions around the world

• Focus Application Areas
• Communications
• Healthcare
• Micro-finance
• Education

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The CATER team

• Healthcare and Medical Education
• Mary Ann Hopkins
• Brian Levine

• Technology
• NYU
• Lakshmi Subramanian
• Jinyang Li
• Yann Lecun
• External collaborators
• Eric Brewer(Berkeley)
• Tapan Parikh(Berkeley)

• Micro-finance
• Jonathan Morduch
• Tapan Parikh

• Developmental Economics
• Yaw Nyarko

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Why ICTD Research?

• Development Theories
• Sachs Give Aid
• Easterly 50 trillion nothing much to show
• Prahlad Bottom of the pyramid
• Empower Rural Markets (Amartya Sen)
• 3-4 billion people with per-capita lt
  US2,000/year
• Could swell to 6-8 billion over the next 25 years
• Most live in rural villages or urban slums and
  shanty townsmovement towards urbanization
• Hard to reach, disorganized, and local markets

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ICT A Big Missing Piece

• Communications
• Awareness, access to external world, phone calls
• Healthcare
• Where there is No Doctor? Rural healthcare
  system
• Telemedicine/consultation
• Continuing Medical Education for Health-workers
• Low-cost diagnostic tools
• Finance
• Microfinance audit, insurance schemes
• Education
• Educational modules, distance learning
• Others
• Agriculture, Commerce, Supply chain and
  E-governance

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Network connectivity is key!

• Traditional wire-line connectivity solutions are
  not economically viable!
• Potential options
• Develop new low-cost connectivity solution!
• Leverage existing low-bandwidth wireless
  solutions
• Cellular, Satellite, CDMA450, WiMax
• Intermittent links are a fact of life
• Budget constrained links
• SMS
• Power outages
• Physical transportation links

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Connectivity options
Type of Network Connectivity
High b/w (5-10 Mbps) WiLDNet
Low b/w (10-80 Kbps) GPRS, Satellite, CDMA, WiMax
Intermittent Low b/w Usage constraint SMS
Intermittent High delay Bus, Postal network
Telemedicine, Distance Learning, Education, Video
Teleconsultation, IP Telephony, Web and Cellphone
based services
Cell-phone Services for Finance Supply
Chain Health care
Rural Cafes Rural ATMs Bulk content Distribution
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Focus Areas

• High bandwidth low-cost connectivity
• WiRE architecute An alternative to Cellular
• WiLDNet Wifi-based Long Distance Networks
• Multi-Radio Mesh networks
• Extending the Web to Rural Areas
• Rural Café Web Access over Intermittent Networks
• SMS Find SMS Search
• Contextual Search Portals
• Intermittent Mobile Applications
• Cell phone based Medical Records
• SmartTrack Drug Tracking System
• ATMosphere Intermittent Rural ATMs

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Need for Economic viability

• Challenges
• Low user densities
• Low purchasing power
• Satellite
• 15K installation 3K per month /Mbps
• Cellular/ WiMax
• High Opex. 5-25 cents/min
• Wireline solutions
• Non starter

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Need a new connectivity solution
Operational Expenditure is very high for
Cellular/WiMax Fiber/WiMax is the least
economically viable
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WiRE Architecture
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Architectural components

• Point-to-point WiLDNet links
• Point-to-multipoint distribution links
• Multi-radio mesh links
• A large local cache at each node
• Mobile devices as end-points
• Why? 40 rural users own a cellphone in
  Africa!!!

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Challenges

• Physical layer
• Steerable antennas, better radios, 802.11n?
• MAC layer
• Unified MAC
• Network layer
• Naming, Addressing, QoS, routing
• Robustness
• Power, maintenance
• Application layer
• Security, End-to-end performance

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Overall vision

• WiRE architecture a replacement to the cellular
  architecture
• Significantly lower cost
• Much higher bandwidth
• Focused coverage
• Significantly lower power
• Intermittent operations
• Economically viable!

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WiFi-based Long Distance Networks

• WiLD links use standard 802.11 radios
• Longer range up to 150km
• Directional antennas (24dBi)
• Line of Sight (LOS)
• Why choose WiFi
• Low cost of 500/node
• Volume manufacturing
• No spectrum costs
• Customizable using open-source drivers
• Good datarates
• 11Mbps (11b), 54Mbps (11g)

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AirJaldi Network

• Tibetan Community
• WiLD links APs
• Links 10 40 Kms
• Achieve 4 5 Mbps
• VoIP Internet
• 10,000 users

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Aravind Eye Hospital Network

• South India
• Tele-ophthalmology
• All WiLD links
• Links 1 15 Kms long
• Achieve 4 5 Mbps
• Video-conferencing
• 3000 consultations/month

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New World Record 382 Kms Pico El Aguila,
Venezuela Elev 4200 meters
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Overall Impact

• Both networks financially sustainable
• 50000 patients/year being scaled to 500000
  patients/year
• Over 3000 thousand patients have recovered sight

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Multi-radio Mesh Networks

• Goal Can we improve wireless throughput using
  multi-radio mesh networks?
• Challenges
• Radio separation constraints
• Nodes are very small
• Solving routing and channel assignment together
• Intra-path interference
• Channel losses and highly fluctuating link
  behavior
• Distributed operation

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Our multi-radio node

• Small nodes
• Highly varying link qualities

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Key Idea
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Our Indoor Testbed

• NSC Geode Processors, 128MB RAM, 1GB Flash
• Implemented on the Click Modular Router
• Patched Madwifi 0.9.3.3

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Focus Areas

• High bandwidth low-cost connectivity
• WiRE architecute An alternative to Cellular
• WiLDNet Wifi-based Long Distance Networks
• Multi-Radio Mesh networks
• Extending the Web to Rural Areas
• Rural Café Web Access over Intermittent Networks
• SMS Find SMS Search
• Contextual Search Portals
• Intermittent Mobile Applications
• Cell phone based Medical Records
• SmartTrack Drug Tracking System
• ATMosphere Intermittent Rural ATMs

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Rural Cafes

• We Search over intermittent links?
• A typical search today involves 4-8 queries!
• Can we do web search in one round?
• An Intermittent proxy based solution
• Change the query interface
• Specify all that you know about what you are
  searching for
• Intermittent proxy issues multiple queries,
  prefetches and bundles response pages
• Local proxy enables search within retrieved
  bundle
• Under deployment in Amrita University, India

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RuralCafe Basic Idea
Local Area Network
Internet
Intermittent Link
Remote Proxy
Local Proxy
Web Servers
Clients
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RuralCafe Search Interface
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SMSFind

• SMS based Contextual Web Search
• Google SMS ,Yahoo Onesearch restricted to fixed
  contexts
• SMSFind features
• 140 byte useful information extraction engine
• Contextual extractors
• Works for arbitrary contexts

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Contextual Search Portals

• How do we setup malaria.google.com?
• A portal to search all information about malaria!
• Uses of Contextual Portals
• Offline web search
• Packing the Relevant Web in a Hard Disk
• Health portals
• Rethinking page-rank within a context?

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Focus Areas

• High bandwidth low-cost connectivity
• WiRE architecute An alternative to Cellular
• WiLDNet Wifi-based Long Distance Networks
• Multi-Radio Mesh networks
• Extending the Web to Rural Areas
• Rural Café Web Access over Intermittent Networks
• SMS Find SMS Search
• Contextual Search Portals
• Intermittent Mobile Applications
• Cell phone based Medical Records
• SmartTrack Drug Tracking System
• ATMosphere Intermittent Rural ATMs

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Cellphone explosion!

• 50-80 coverage in many parts of Africa
• 100 million subscribers in India, 200 million in
  China and growing at 20
• Grameen Phone model
• Use a SIM and not a cellphone!
• Calling rates are still incredibly high in Africa!

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Lightweight Mobile Databases

• Need for Tele-consultation
• Where there is No Doctor?
• Health-workers in the field use cell-phones to
  enter health records
• Need a distributed database synchronization/search
  mechanism which works over SMS-links
• Lightweight Cell-phone based medical record
  system
• Example CD4 History DB for AIDS patients
• Constrained Databases (fieldsqueries)
• Semantic Compression of DB records
• Records are SMS-updatable
• Privacy Security Challenges

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SmartTrack

• Two big problems with ARV Therapy Programs
• Drug theft and counterfeit drugs
• Patient adherence
• SmartTrack
• Use Cell phones to track flow of drugs
• Tag medication bottles with Smart Tags
• Patients report consumption using SMS
• User Interface Challenges
• User Studies Initial testing in Ghana, South
  Africa

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Cell-phone based Microfinance

• Pitfalls of Existing Microfinance Models
• High transaction costs
• Corruption
• The Branchless Banking Model
• Use programmable cell-phones to authenticate
  transactions
• Outsource loan recollection to shop-keepers
• Provide SIM cards to shopkeepers and loan-takers
• Secure repayment receipts using SMS
• Benefits Reduce transaction costs and corruption

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ATMosphere

• Rural ATMs over mobile SMS
• ATMosphere
• Offline authentication
• Redistribution of balances
• Cash availability
• Minimal risk of cheating/overdraft
• Results from Uganda model
• 99 cash availability
• Usage costs of 18 cents/user/year
• Up to 10 cash availability in offline mode

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Questions?

• Thank you!

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Distance to Clinic
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Literacy
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Need translators
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Age distribution
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Challenges

• Prohibitive cost of smartphones
• Limited data communication infrastructure
• Cost of communication
• Language
• Illiteracy

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• Motivation
• Maintaining accountability in the supply chain
• Tracking patient adherence and symptoms
• Cellphones as a healthcare platform

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Deployment
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Results

• Elimination of intra-path interference leads to
  multi-hop throughputs comparable with single-hop
  throughputs
• Having multiple gateways greatly improves spatial
  frequency reuse, leading to high overall
  throughput
• Load and short-time-scale link variance is very
  important to consider when evaluating a link
• Routes and channels are stable, under ROMA